Power dissipation is becoming one of the major hurdles in the design of next-generation processors. Power density is increasing in each generation. Such power density is translated into heat generation. The cost of removing this heat increases at the same rate as power density. Meanwhile, in order to reduce dynamic power consumption, supply voltage is also reduced. To counteract its negative effect on transistor switching delay, the threshold voltage is scaled accordingly. However, lowering threshold voltage has a significant impact on leakage power, which is highly dependent on temperature.
Clustered micro-architectures are thermal-effective. This is because distributing processor resources also helps distributing power dissipation and temperature. Nevertheless, maximum temperatures that occur at clustered micro-architectures may still result in significant cooling costs. Further, maximum temperatures at clustered micro-architectures may result in increased average temperatures.